Today we are looking at the average gamer who wants to have some fun at climbing the competitive ladder.
The chart hereunder presents the repartition of the players in the different leagues for League of Legend (Europe West Server), Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty and Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm. I did not include Challenger leagues, as they represent less than 0.05% of the players in both games. The results are striking: There is a much more even split in Starcraft. How does that impact the players?
Starcraft ladder is built for a regular progression
Real-time strategy, like Starcraft imply good and quick decision making while performing a lot of varied tasks (fighting, producing, building, scouting). Quite logically, it takes a great deal of time to become a decent player. However this investment is rewarded in Starcraft with frequent progressions in league.
Recognizing that you learn a lot in your first 50 games, Blizzard even thought that the Bronze league was too disparate. Some players are complete beginners while others have already a good grasp of the game. In Heart of the Swarm, they reduced the size of the Bronze league so that players that trained a bit, are quickly rewarded with a new league.
All in all, the average Starcraft 2 player is in Gold, and will get 2.26 promotions in his career (assuming never going backwards!). On top of that, he has good reasons to hope as Platinum is not far from reach.
League of Legends ladder is built for the elite
In League of Legends, there are less mechanics than in Starcraft but definitely much more champions and spells to discover. Therefore it takes a lot of experience to have a good understanding of the game. The issue is that a lot of players have the impression to be stuck in “Elo Hell”. The concept is that you play with unskilled players, therefore cannot win, therefore cannot escape those unskilled players and are therefore condemned to stay in Bronze or Silver.
When you look at the ladder structure, you realize that almost everybody but the most skilled are in ”Elo Hell”. 82% of the players are in Bronze/Silver. Sure you can do better in theory with training and dedication, but statistically, you won’t.
All in all, the average League of Legend player is in Silver, and will get 0.85 promotions in his career. Yes you read it correctly, on average, LoL players have the pleasure of having less than 1 promotion in their whole LoL career. And on the contrary to his Starcraft counterpart, the average Lol player has no real hope to reach the Gold League!
Even if you assume that the bottom 20% of the players are beginners and should not be counted in statistics of the probable final league of an average player, the answer does not change. You are still in Silver, thank you very much for coming.
Riot’s Business Model: One reason for the Elo Hell?
In my completely naive opinion, player satisfaction should be the key element in the design of a feature. However I realize that frustration might be at the core of Riot business model. Given the time dedicated to the game, rankings have a lot of impact on the player self-esteem. They all thrive to get better and given the difficulty of the ladder, they need to play much more. And probably to spend much more. Better runes and better heroes often come at a price (see this article). If you can reach Platinum in 6 months, you would be tempted to stop, believing that you explored the game quite well. By staying in Bronze/Silver, you are under the impression that you are far worse than the majority of players and therefore need to better yourself to prove your worth. I’m not saying that Bronze players are “good”, far from it. They deserve their relative ranking but I think they also deserve to have some satisfaction in term of league progression.
Clearly I would advocate a slight change of LoL leagues. Something like 25% Bronze 25% Silver, so that the average player has at least Gold in sight. Maybe they need to create an additional league (the famous “plastic league”), in order to maintain selectiveness but still reward their customer base with league progression.
For the people that may think that I might be biased by my own experience, the answer is yes. I was Platinum in Starcraft WoL (obtained in 7/8 months) and I am still Bronze in League of Legend (In something like a full year).
Links:
An interesting article on Cloth5 on the necessity to make it hard for player to progress
My review of League of Legend Business Model
Would you support a change in League of Legends rankings, or do you prefer the challenge that is currently offered?
EuroExark
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